First OData Hackathon Challenge Winner at APIWorld

Find out who won our hackathon challenge, where we asked developers to build an app for voice assistant services using the OData API and DataDirect Cloud.

Update: Looking for the best in connectivity for your data in the cloud? While DataDirect Cloud is no longer available, Hybrid Data Pipeline has all the same features and more! Learn more about Hybrid Data Pipeline.

Silicon Valley geeks flocked to the General Assembly at 225 Bush Street in downtown San Francisco for the APIWorld+Integrate 2016 Hackathon, competing for close to $80,000 in prizes—including the first OData focused challenge sponsored by Progress DataDirect. We promote the adoption and advancement of the OData standard by serving on the OData Technical Committee.

We were really excited to get top talent from the coolest tech companies developing against the OData API and DataDirect Cloud. It was also great to sponsor the event among our friends from SAP Hybris, IBM Strongloop and HPE.

First Place: Echo Jokes

Echo Jokes from Cloud demonstrated interoperable access to Salesforce and Sugar CRMs via OData API. They store jokes in the CRM, which are accessed with Amazon Echo to verbally request a joke. They then leverage Microsoft Cognitive Services API to detect facial recognition on how funny the joke was, with intent to write that score back to the CRM. While the jokes are fun, the project shows real-world applications for organizations to interact with their customers using digital agents with cameras to measure satisfaction.

Second Place: Realty Check

Team Members: Revanth Anireddy, Swami Sundaramurthy

Prizes: Cash prize ($500), one year of DataDirect Cloud with five data sources ($2,500)

Realty Check developed a realtor dashboard that tracks questions from prospective homebuyers across multiple homes, blended with personality API from Traitify to rank the homes. The DataDirect Cloud service provided an instant REST API against Postgres RDBMS as the read/write connectivity hub for the architecture.

Third Place: Flash Secretary

Team Member: Alex Kudrishova

Prize: Cash prize ($100)

Flash Secretary demonstrated the ability to ask Alexa for leads, demonstrating filtering capabilities against Salesforce CRM across leads with OData API. This targets executives on the run who need to interact with customer data. There was varying success with different accents on the team, but currently Alexa’s official language is English.

How Was OData Received?

We presented an overview of the Hackathon Challenge, which you can check out here. Some teams were intimately familiar with OData from their day jobs, and others learned about it when reading the Hackathon Challenge.

The participants agree there is a need for a standard here, especially when developing against multiple data sources. For other devs interested in building hybrid on-premises and cloud, DataDirect Cloud accelerated development by instantly producing OData against relational database storage such as Postgres or MySQL.

Sumit Sarkar is a Chief Data Evangelist at Progress, with over 10 years experience working in the data connectivity field. The world's leading consultant on open data standards connectivity with cloud data, Sumit's interests include performance tuning of the data access layer for which he has developed a patent pending technology for its analysis; business intelligence and data warehousing for SaaS platforms; and data connectivity for aPaaS environments, with a focus on standards such as ODBC, JDBC, ADO.NET and ODATA. He is an IBM Certified Consultant for IBM Cognos Business Intelligence and TDWI member. He has presented sessions on data connectivity at various conferences including Dreamforce, Oracle OpenWorld, Strata Hadoop, MongoDB World and SAP Analytics and Business Objects Conference, among many others.

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